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Did Sam Adams have a Hampton connection?

Submitted by Bill on Tue, 2013-04-30 14:52

Memory is fickle sometimes. A few days ago I was asked a question by a visiting genealogist. By the way, we get lots of those. With a history going back almost 375 years there are people from every corner of our country who can trace their ancestries back to one of the founders of our town. It's not unusual to see someone here doing research just about every day, especially in the summertime. But I digress. The question had to do with Massachusetts revolutionary Samuel Adams and his Hampton ancestors. I was surprised by the question because I have been looking up Hampton genealogy for more than three decades and this was the first (or so I thought) that I had heard about Sam Adams having Hampton ancestry. I was a bit dubious about whether or not it was true. So I ventured up to our New Hampshire room and cracked open some books to figure it out. To my surprise it turned out to be true. Sam Adams' mother was Mary Fifield, daughter of Richard Fifield, and granddaughter of Giles Fifield and Mary Perkins, who both lived in Hampton in the mid-1600s. Mary was the daughter of Abraham Perkins, one of the founders of the town and, coincidentally, one of my own personal ancestors.

So, like I say, I was very surprised. How did I not know this already? I'm sure you've already figured out that I had known it, but had just forgotten. In fact, thirteen years ago I wrote an article for the local newspaper about famous people with Hampton ancestry, and Sam Adams was included. Oh well, so my memory is not the greatest sometimes. Maybe in another thirteen years I can "discover" the news about Sam Adams all over again!

If you'd like to read the article it is available on our website, and is as timely as ever. Well, except for the final paragraph where I talk about something new at the library - audiobooks on CD! We still have plenty of those and they are enormously popular even though many people are now using the library's subscription to Overdrive to download audiobooks onto their mobile devices. Most of our books on tape are gone now though, as very few people use them any more.